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Syria: Teenager’s execution by radical Islamists sparks outrage, fear

By HANIA MOURTADANew York Times

Mon., June 10, 2013

BEIRUT—The teenager’s name was Muhammad al-Qatta, and he was 14 years old when, witnesses said, radical Islamists in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo pulled him from his coffee kiosk Sunday and later executed him in a public square.

Muhammad had left his house to close up his kiosk, where his work supported his family, his mother said. When someone approached him looking for a free cup of coffee, the teenager uttered the phrase that cast him among the victims of the war’s growing depravity.

The mother of a 14-year-old boy describes how her son was executed in Aleppo, Syria, by radical Islamists for insulting the Prophet Muhammad. (YouTube)

“He was talking to this guy and told him, ‘I don’t want to lend you anything,’ ” the teenager’s father quoted him as saying. “ ‘If Muhammad, peace be upon him, were to come to this Earth right now, I would still not lend a cup of coffee to anyone unless they pay for it.’ ”

Three men wearing long beards and the robes favoured by ultraconservatives overheard the exchange. They accused the teenager of insulting the prophet, then took him away in a car. When they returned an hour later, Muhammad bore the marks of a beating. In a square, they covered his head with his shirt, a makeshift blindfold, as if he were “some big shot,” his mother said.

She watched from her balcony as hundreds of people gathered around. A neighbourhood resident, Abu Abdo, heard what the men said. Addressing the “respected people of Aleppo,” they warned that cursing God or the Prophet Muhammad was a sin, saying it would be “punished this way.”

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The teenager’s father heard the shots. His wife told him that the men had killed their son.

In her anguish, she invoked the name of another teenage victim in Syria, Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, whose death at the hands of government forces helped propel the uprising, now a war in its third year. He was pulled aside two years ago by government agents at a protest, brutalized and killed before being sent back to his family.

Just as Hamza’s death crystallized the rage against President Bashar Assad, Muhammad’s killing stoked similar feelings against a new power that has emerged during the war. It focused anger on radical Islamists, including foreigners, who have seized on the conflict in Syria as an opportunity to impose their mores. For Muhammad’s mother and some of her neighbours, the tyrannies were indistinguishable, trapping many Syrians in a vise.

“Who kills a teen, whatever the reason is, is a killer,” Abdo said, adding that Syrians were looking for life without the government’s security thugs “or radical Sunnis who raise black flags and want to build a state not fit for our minds.”

On Monday, Syrian opposition groups rushed to distance themselves from the killing, which was publicized by a watchdog group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights based in Britain.

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The Syrian Coalition, the main umbrella opposition group, said in a statement that it “condemned the unconfirmed reports” of the death and called it a crime against humanity. The Local Co-ordination Committees, an anti-government group, called the killing “heinous” but blamed the coalition for failing to secure “liberated areas.”

The condemnations were a measure of the growing anger at the small but assertive cadre of extremists who have joined the rebel ranks and whose hard-line beliefs have unsettled even pious Syrians. Their influence is being felt in mosques, in schools and in committees and courts intended to enforce a strict version of Islamic law. Disgust with the radicals has peaked in recent months after reports of summary executions, including of government soldiers and men accused of crimes.

Last month, antigovernment activists in Aleppo were beaten and detained by armed guards of the city’s sharia committee, after the activists tried to raise the flag of the Syrian revolution. One of them, Seif Azzam, said the Islamists told two of his friends they were “infidels who should be killed for the sake of God.” They were eventually released.

“The sharia committee’s behaviour is completely identical to that of air force intelligence,” said Azzam, referring to the most feared government intelligence agency. “We are revolting against Assad’s regime and the sharia committee at the same time.”

Muhammad’s mother said she thought that two of the men who killed her son were possibly foreigners but that the third was Syrian. His father, who spoke in a separate video interview, was less sure. “There are a lot of battalions nowadays, how can we know?”

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